Three Lists
There are three lists.
The first is all the stuff I thought I wanted to do. Become a famous writer. Unseat a president with undercover reporting. Make love to lots of hot women. Direct famous movies. Win a gold medal as the untouted member of the US Equestrian Team. Be an award winning creative director. Be someone interesting enough to open SNL and do the talk show circuit. Be the kind of guy everyone listens to in the room. Pull off a Nehru jacket at a cocktail party. Tell the funniest jokes on the planet. Blah, blah, blah.
The second is all the stuff I think I still want to do, all untested by reality. Stuff like, learn to surf and sail, scuba dive with my wife and kids, ride the Colorado River, write a book/story/play/poem/tv show/movie/essay that’s life-changing for all who read/see/experience it, meditate better, travel the world with my kids, make more money, win big ad awards (still), found a theatre company that produces work that bends time and space with cleverness and authenticity and earnestness. There’s more, but really, who cares? As you can see, the things I still think I want to do is a forward looking shadow of the things I thought I wanted to do.
Then, there’s the third list.
That’s the list filled with things like marry a woman with freckles who can eat fire and has a wicked sense of playfulness, be a dad to two boys who yell at each other half the time and play like old friends the other half, help an amazing redhead be as fiercely herself as possible, bike to Walnut Creek for a hamburger, meet Jesse Owens and learn that he was friends with my Uncle Jimmy Lee, hold an Oscar statue given to the screenwriter Ben Hecht in my hands in the bowels of the Newberry Library, be mistaken for Moby, nearly get fired by David Mamet from a bookstore that taught me the real value of reading, move to LA and live between a McDonald’s and a Buddhist temple at Crescent and Sunset, kiss a girl in front of the Chagall of downtown Chicago’s hot summer midnight dark, talk with my father before he dies about what’s on his mind, make Tacos for my sister when she’s recovering from chemo, apologize to a woman I married and hurt, rebuild a Lego At-At without instructions for my kid, ride the Matterhorn at Disneyland 12 zillion times because I love the laughter that comes out of the boys every damn time we do it, listen to a friend play “The Rain Song” from the bumper of a car in the Staten Island summer heat, drive a Mini Cooper from Cedars Sinai with a new life in the back, ride a bike to Subway with a laughing 8 year-old , get ice cream on a lark in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. And more.
The first list goes on and on and never ends. But it’s full of things that don’t carry much meaning anymore. The second list, while tempered by time, also stretches out forever. It’s all in the future, too — all based on a person I want to be.
It’s the third list that’s meaningful. It’s an incomplete list but one that will someday find an end that is sharp and cliff-like. It’s a list of the things I’ve actually done while trying to do the things on the first two lists.
Which is not to say the first two lists are useless, or bad, or a stupid fantasy. They are necessary because they are signs of hope and ambition and the values I carry within and project outward. But they are best used as guides, rather than goals or definitions. They are places to aim toward, not land.
The first two are lists that you make. The third makes you.
